Human Resource Management Issues

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3.2 Effects of Individualism

Increasing individualism has affected the organization loyalty and manager’s leadership and management. Genc (2014) claims that employees belonging to individualistic culture will usually use knowledge as the source of power for individual benefits rather than organizational resource and will result in decline of trade unionism. Individualistic culture in an organization will also diversify individual expectations. For the changes brought by the individualism in human resources environment, human resources department professionals will require to understand the underlying motivations of individualistic culture and better recognize the attitude and behavior of employees. Implementation of individualized human resources policies and practices will maintain changes occurred at organizations due to individualism.

4 Technological changes

Consistent changes in technology have affected both private and public organizations globally. Many organizations adopt training technologies that include e-learning, video-conferencing and simulations. Human resource department has also been influenced by the changes in technology. According to Stone and Dulebohn (2013, p.3), growing use of internet and web-based technologies has made employees to use these web-based platforms for the purpose of training and development. Technological changes have also affected human resource department responses across business sectors. Several methods such as education, communications, employee participation and involvement, facilitation and support have been used in overcoming the resistance to technological change.

4.1 Effects of Technological changes

According to Xie and Hayase (2007), technology, human resources and organizational assets have become fundamental units to improve productivity and for better financial performance in an organization. These fundamental units constitute competitive advantage for an organization. Technological advancements have also provided employees flexibility in their working system. According to Serradell, Castillo and Lytras (2010), technology has shown a profound effect on changing human resource environment. Changes in technology have helped modify varieties of human resource processes such as recruitment, human resource planning, selection, workflow, training, performance management and compensation. Apart from these, periodic changes in technology will require human resource department professionals to work more closely with technology professionals for being more productive and proficient. They will also need to gain more technology based knowledge, skills and abilities.

5 Potential trends and Future challenges

Rapid technological developments and faster pace of work processes have caused changes in work environment and have also made human resource development initiatives more self-oriented, globally focused and information based. Moschetto (2013) argues that continued industrial development, use of new technology and management of changes for technology introduction and improvement initiatives could result in future challenges for human resource department.

5.1 Development and Retention of Talents

For many companies in Asia, unavailability of sufficient talents has been the major obstacle for the growth in businesses. Similarly, lack of required leadership and management skills has also prevented the potential development of talents. As a result, the employers will better focus on talent development and retention rather than in talent attraction even though some companies in Asia have implemented policies about granting preferential immigration work visas for the talented people. However, the talent development and retention will require many foreign employees and professionals, the government and the employers will need to work harder in better utilizing local talents. It will also let human resource department professionals to update their knowledge continuously by developing necessary career development plans to remain relevant.

5.2 Outsourcing

Similar to globalization, many organizations are increasingly adopting to outsourcing as the only efficient mean for their human resource department activities. With the rise in the cost of manpower, human resources try to be even more efficient that will continue the trend of outsourcing. Chan and Osman (2009) suggests that many outsourcing activities along with their allied forms provide opportunities for training and development which are mostly in the form of redesign and implementation of new work processes. Continuous adoption of outsourcing will lead many human resource department professional transforming into human resources entrepreneurs and consultants requiring them to demonstrate unique expertise in related fields.

5.3 Change Management

Change management is one of the most important priorities that organizations need to address now and in the future. Although, strategies have been implemented to support the change management by human resource department, professionals from human resource department will be able to maintain the competitive advantage of the organization only by updating their knowledge continuously and planning their career accordingly.

5.4 Measuring effectiveness of Human resource department interventions

Balanced score-card measures have been used as the human resource department measurements in public sectors and cost benefit analysis models for private sectors. Due to increasing requirement of result based evidence for corporate management, human resource professionals will require to equip themselves with updated knowledge of human capital measurements and the use of effective evaluation models. According to Mishra and Akman (2010), human resources metrics will become more significant in the future although many organizations have started discussing how these are supposed to be implemented.

6 Conclusion

In conclusion, it is important to further the research for finding other contributing factors that bring changes in human resources environment. Although, change in technologies and globalization have affected the management and business operations of many organizations, their impacts on human resource department strategies and interventions have not yet been well known which implies the necessity of future systematic research. More exhaustive studies on cross-cultural and international human resource department